Thrillers

ORIGINS OF THE MOVIE THRILLER

The thriller goes against the grain of mundane modern life while at the
same time remaining immersed in it. This concept indicates that the
thriller is an essentially modern form, whose rise coincides with the
arrival of urban industrialism, mass society, middle-class lifestyle, and
the twentieth century. In other words, the thriller is a response to a
modern world that is perceived under normal circumstances to be
fundamentally not thrilling. As Alfred Hitchcock (1899–1980)
observed in a 1936 magazine article ("Why 'Thrillers'
Thrive," in Gottlieb, p. 109), "Our civilization has so
screened and sheltered us that it isn't practicable to experience
sufficient thrills at firsthand." The thriller seeks to redeem the
unadventurous modern world with a spirit of old-fashioned adventure.

Although the thriller did not fully emerge until the early part of the
twentieth century, it has relevant roots reaching back to the eighteenth
century. Three literary antecedents are especially important: the Gothic
novel,

In thrillers like
North by Northwest
(Alfred Hitchcock, 1959), the marvelous enters the world of the
mundane.

beginning with Horace Walpole's (1717–1797)
The Castle of Otranto
(1765), whose horrific, hyperatmospheric tales involved the reader in a
new way, with an increased emphasis on suspense and sensation; the
Victorian sensation novel, inaugurated by Wilkie Collins's
(1824–1889)
The Woman in White
(1860), which adapted the sensational and atmospheric effects of Gothic
fiction to a more contemporary, familiar context; and the early detective
story, pioneered by Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) (creator of C.
Auguste Dupin, 1841) and Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) (creator of
Sherlock Holmes, 1887), whose adventures breathed an air of momentous
mystery into the modern, urban, domestic world.

The roots of the thriller can be more generally related to the rise of
urban-industrial society in the nineteenth century, which created a new
mass audience, along with new popular entertainment forms to serve that
audience. One of the most important was the melodramatic theater, which
placed a premium on action and visual spectacle, including suspenseful,
last-minute rescues of heroes and heroines tied to railroad tracks,
menaced by buzz saws, and dangled from precipices.

Another relevant area of nineteenth-century popular entertainment
encompasses amusement parks, fairgrounds, and their thrilling rides and
attractions (e.g., the roller coaster, Ferris wheel, and fun house). Like
these attractions, the thriller works primarily to evoke visceral,
gut-level feelings, such as suspense, fright, excitement, speed, and
motion, rather than subtle or weighty emotions, such as tragedy, pathos,
pity, love, and nostalgia. The thriller stresses sensations more than
sensitivity; it is a sensational form.

Amusement parks and fairgrounds were among the main venues for early
motion picture exhibition, which was dominated by novelty-oriented short
films. A large group of these films highlighted the sensation of motion by
placing the camera on moving vehicles such as trolleys, trains, boats, and
elevators. Such sensations were eventually incorporated into an early film
genre known as the chase film (of which the Edison Company's 1903
hit
The Great Train Robbery
is an unusually ambitious example), using a minimal story set-up as the
springboard for an extended pursuit.

The period from 1907 to 1913 saw the movie industry's growing
domination by narrative filmmaking, a development most closely identified
with the American director D. W. Griffith (1875–1948). Among the
techniques of film storytelling that Griffith refined, the one most
pertinent to the thriller is cross-cutting (i.e., cutting back and forth
between related actions occurring in different places). He applied this
suspense-enhancing device to melodramatic last-minute rescue situations in
a number of short films made for the Biograph Company, such as
The Lonedale Operator
(1911), in which a locomotive engineer races to save his besieged
sweetheart, and
Death's Marathon
(1913), whose climax intermixes a distraught wife, her suicide-bent
husband, a telephone connection, and a speeding automobile.

An eccentric contributor to the evolution of the movie thriller was the
serial, whose episodic structure enabled action and suspense sequences to
dominate a lengthy narrative with a nearly constant succession of thrills.
Evolving in the mid-1910s, early American serials frequently featured
female protagonists in recurring situations of jeopardy, as indicated by
such titles as
The Adventures of Kathlyn
(1913),
The Perils of Pauline
(1914), and
The Mysteries of Myra
(1916). In Europe, the serial achieved greater artistic stature,
particularly in the work of France's Louis Feuillade
(1873–1925). In his celebrated serials
Fantômas
(1914),
Les Vampires
(1915–1916), and
Judex
(1916), supercriminals and secret societies transform sturdy bourgeois
Paris into a surreptitious, almost surreal battleground, riddled with trap
doors and hidden panels, infiltrated by hooded blackclad figures who
scurry over rooftops and shimmy down drainpipes, and undermined by a
constant succession of reversals and disguises.